"Naturally there was a good deal of interest among our chaps to see what would happen. Fellows like Shorty Shaw said it was all nonsense for a pack of Gurkhas to expect to do what everybody else had failed in. It seemed a tall order, and some of the boys betted long odds against the thing ever being done that way. I don't mind telling you that I had my little bit at five to one on little old Diddly. He gave me confidence somehow or other; I don't know why.
"Well, every night some of the Gurkhas would be out of the trenches. As for Diddly, he used to be missing for days on end. And when you saw him he was no longer laughing and full of jokes. He looked just about as happy as a Belgian farmer. This went on for a bit, and then one day Diddly turned up all jokes and smiles again. The odds went down to six to four that night, and even Shorty Shaw admitted that little old Diddly must know something.
"Then came the Suvla Bay landing on August 6. The night before all the Gurkhas went off somewhere, and we were left behind. We had our own troubles early next morning, and they were bad enough. But not so bad, but every man was on the keevee (qui vive) for some sound of Anafarta Anne. When there was not a word from that quarter we all allowed that Diddly had done it on the Turks; and that night I could have had my money if I had insisted on it. But, as it turned out, it wasn't so.
"It was a good time afterwards that I had the true story of what happened from a man in the ——th, who was in the big night march from the Maori Outpost. The ——th were hot after Anafarta Anne, too, and got to the gun emplacement a few minutes after Diddly and his Gurkhas. He says he found them there in possession of the place, and of a lot of dead Turks pretty badly cut about with knives. But Anafarta Anne, drawn by a mule team, was just showing her tail around a bend of the hills half a mile or so away. He said Diddly was very sore about it; but I never heard that till much later.
"I saw Diddly himself the following day, but only at a distance. The Gurkhas were just going out to charge, and that was worth seeing. Each man of them had his rifle slung over his back, and his big knife in his teeth, so as to leave his hands free. They had been laughing like in camp; a very gay push. Then they got the word to go. An English officer ran first, a fair-headed man a foot taller than his Gurkha band. He was in front, but not a pace away ran old Diddly and another Gurkha tough. They had only eyes for one thing: the sahib officer. So I saw them charge away into the dusk of early morning.
"You know that charge carried them right away to the top of the big hill, and to a sight of the Dardanelles beyond. But Diddly never saw the Dardanelles. We moved up behind them in support, and found Diddly in a little spur of the gully. He and his tough little mate were lying dead, and underneath them was the dead body of that fine white officer. The left hands of the two Gurkhas were all cut to ribbons, where they had grabbed the Turkish bayonets, and there was awful evidence that they had known how to use the notched knives they still gripped in their other hands. The rest of that day, and of some bad days that followed, I felt as if I had lost another dear old mate. And I wasn't the only one that felt like that about good old Diddly.
"So, you see, it doesn't do to judge a man by the colour of his skin. I knew a good Chinaman once. And my Uncle Fred, who used to spar with Peter Jackson, often used to say he would as soon shake hands with Peter as with any white man he ever knew. That's why I say to Shorty Shaw that I'm never going to worry if nobody never calls me nothing worse than a White Gurkha."
THE MAN WHO WASN'T LET